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It’s that time of year of again when we start scouring the internet for gift ideas. Luckily, Acorn media have served up another platter of top notch dramas for you to acquire this holiday season.

BBC One’s brilliantly clever 2013 drama Mayday comes to Acorn DVD on the 23 November. Starring Aiden Gillen (Batman: The Dark Knight Rises) it is full of more twists and turns than the Monte Carlo Grand Prix. The five part drama is based around a straightforward topic – the murder of a young woman. The events thereafter are handled in a rather unusual manner. There are four primary suspects but in the absence of a Marple or Poirot figure the audience are left to do the investigative work themselves.

Each of the suspects has an accuser but as the show progresses you began to wonder if the real villains are the accused or their accusers. Mi

As previously reported, the series will follow a girl named Clary Fray (who has yet to be cast), who discovers on her 18th birthday that she’s a Shadowhunter: a human-angel hybrid born to hunt demons. Following her mother’s kidnapping, Clary teams up with a fellow Shadowhunter (Sherwood’s

As a small community celebrates May Day, 14-year-old May Queen Hattie disappears.

The BBC’s recent five-part thriller Mayday, shown on consecutive nights over one week last month, comes out on DVD today complete with standard extra features including a ‘making-of’, cast filmographies and a photo gallery.

Set in a small countryside community during their traditional May Day celebrations, local popular girl Hattie Sutton (Leila Mimmack) disappears on her way to take part in the parade as the May Queen. Over the next few hours and days, as the search for the teenager widens and the likely outcome grows grimmer, the town is torn apart by suspicion and a lack of trust as neighbours and family turn on one another and

BBC One’s brilliantly clever Mayday came to an end tonight in an episode that was full of more twists and turns than the Monte Carlo Grand Prix. The five part drama was based around a straightforward topic – the murder of a young woman. The events thereafter were handled in a rather unusual manner. There were four primary suspects but in the absence of a Marple or Poirot figure the audience were left to do the investigative work themselves.

Each of the suspects had an accuser but as the show progressed you began to wonder if the real villains were the accused or their accusers. Mi5 veteran Peter Firth was frighteningly convincing as the town pervert while Sophie Okonedo and Lesley Manville managed to pull on the audience’s heart strings as they faced up to the horror of being married to murder suspects. Sam Spruell

Lovers of TV crime drama rarely have to wait long for a child killing set in a small, inbred community of ordinary people with secrets up their sleeves, so I suppose we shouldn't be surprised when two come at once. We were the more generously served by Mayday, which the BBC ran over five successive nights, partly in deference to binge-watching trends, but also, perhaps, because they felt they had something to flaunt. And maybe they did. It was engaging in a British (ie non-Scandinavian) way, pulling us into the darker currents of the story by way of some light humour over an obese dog. Why was he so fat? More exercise, suggested the vet. Lesley Manville was wonderful as the dog's owner, Gail, half-indignant,

Lovers of TV crime drama rarely have to wait long for a child killing set in a small, inbred community of ordinary people with secrets up their sleeves, so I suppose we shouldn't be surprised when two come at once. We were the more generously served by Mayday, which the BBC ran over five successive nights, partly in deference to binge-watching trends, but also, perhaps, because they felt they had something to flaunt. And maybe they did. It was engaging in a British (ie non-Scandinavian) way, pulling us into the darker currents of the story by way of some light humour over an obese dog. Why was he so fat? More exercise, suggested the vet. Lesley Manville was wonderful as the dog's owner, Gail, half-indignant,

ITV's Broadchurch is bloody brilliant TV that proves anything the Danish can do, we can do with Pauline Quirke lurking behind a caravan as a cherry on top. It's The Killing with West Country accents and 99 Flakes rather than knitted jumpers and subtitles.

We're only one hour into the eight-part crime drama, but my head is already spinning with possibilities as to who killed 11-year-old Danny Latimer.

Was it his shifty-looking dad (Andrew Buchan), who looks like he's been getting his end away more often than a Premier League footballer in a strip club? Did cornershop owner David Bradley do it with 50 pence of sherbet lemons? Are Arthur Darvill's reverend and David Tennant's detective inspector in a Doctor Who conspiracy?

The list of suspects is as long as a Peter Jackson movie and on a purely whodunnit level, the show is gripping entertainment.

BBC One's Mayday has been intriguing an audience of over 4 million viewers all week with its dark murder mystery.

'Who killed 14-year-old May Queen Hattie?' is the big question, hidden beneath tales of seedy peeping Toms, twisted relationships, moody teens and a broken community. But have you figured out the culprit yet?

Peter Firth's Malcolm was the obvious suspect after an intense feud with Hattie, but after killing himself midway through the series, he looks likely to be a red herring.

Could it be Seth (Tom Fisher) or Steve (Sam Spruell), the brothers who both have connections with the late girl?

Or maybe you think the sinister-looking Everett, played to creepy lip-curling perfection by Aiden Gillen, went too far with one of his sexual dalliances?

British murder dramas Mayday and Broadchurch have helped bring event television back from the grave

Who wants to think about murdered children on a weekday evening? A fair few of us, if the ratings are anything to go by. This week BBC1 and ITV have gone head to head with new crime dramas Mayday and Broadchurch: both with decorated casts and nuanced scripts that lift them above the standard police procedural; both previewed as the kind of event television that can seem antediluvian in an age of download and bargain box sets.

Mayday, which tracks the disappearance of 14-year-old Hattie as she is about to take the part of May Queen in her village's annual parade, stars Sophie Okonedo, Aidan Gillen and a fabulously overwrought Lesley Manville. It launched on Sunday – the first of five consecutive nights – with 6.2 million viewers and a 25% audience share; but lost out the following

BBC2's Top Gear Africa Special, in which Clarkson and the boys attempted to find the source of the Nile, got the better of ITV's ailing Dancing on Ice on Sunday night with almost 6 million viewers.

The BBC had a good evening all round, with new BBC1 9pm drama Mayday beating ITV's Mr Selfridge, and Call the Midwife sailing along serenely with more than 9 million viewers.

The Top Gear Africa special, the first instalment of a two-parter to round off the current series, averaged 5.7 million viewers and a 19.6% audience share in the 8pm hour.

This audience included 1.1 million watching the BBC HD simulcast – a frisky figure for a channel that has otherwise struggled to establish itself, featuring as it does a mishmash of programming from all the corporation's TV channels other than BBC1 (which has

What chilled most about murder mystery Mayday was the claim of an ancestral right to wear green man makeup

You'd naturally think Aidan Gillen killed Hattie, the 14-year-old May Queen, in the woods above the village. Ever since he played transgressive super-hottie Stuart in Queer as Folk, he's worked sneering lips and leering eyes as a series of reptiles, chancers and scumbags – dodgy mayor in The Wire, slimy counsellor in Game of Thrones, venal banker in credit-crunch drama Freefall. Why not add murderer to the list?

In Mayday (BBC1), he's similarly sinister: a bad dad who thumps his son for nothing and buries his grief over his dead wife in video game marathons. Plus he has a mysterious bag locked in a cupboard. Could it be a body-bag full of May Queen? Possibly. Harold Pinter called Gillen "dangerous" when he was in The Caretaker, which is damning evidence. The prosecution rests,

What chilled most about murder mystery Mayday was the claim of an ancestral right to wear green man makeup

You'd naturally think Aidan Gillen killed Hattie, the 14-year-old May Queen, in the woods above the village. Ever since he played transgressive super-hottie Stuart in Queer as Folk, he's worked sneering lips and leering eyes as a series of reptiles, chancers and scumbags – dodgy mayor in The Wire, slimy counsellor in Game of Thrones, venal banker in credit-crunch drama Freefall. Why not add murderer to the list?

In Mayday (BBC1), he's similarly sinister: a bad dad who thumps his son for nothing and buries his grief over his dead wife in video game marathons. Plus he has a mysterious bag locked in a cupboard. Could it be a body-bag full of May Queen? Possibly. Harold Pinter called Gillen "dangerous" when he was in The Caretaker, which is damning evidence. The prosecution rests,

Goodbye Being Human, but hello Parks and Recreation. This week's Must-See TV is a little bit of an emotional rollercoaster, mixing long-awaited arrivals with some sad, sad departures and gritty murder mysteries with some controversial comedy.

Plus, there's two big Comic Relief TV events taking place in advance of the big day itself on March 15 - Russell Brand's Give It Up gig (Wednesday, March 6 at 10pm on BBC Three) in aid of beating addiction and Comic Relief's Big Chat with Graham Norton, all six hours of which will air live on BBC Three on Thursday, March 7 from 7pm, with highlights following Friday at 10.35pm on BBC One.

A project that was initially announced a year ago is finally set to make its debut... S&A fave Sophie Okonedo stars alongside Peter Firth, Aidan Gillen and Lesley Manville in what the BBC is calling a "sophisticated five-part thriller" titled Mayday, from writers Ben Court and Caroline Ip (Whitechapel). What's the Mayday story: When a young girl goes missing on her way to the Mayday parade, the small community in which she lives looks to one another for answers. But beneath the picture-postcard idyll lies a sinister other world and the dark woods teem with myth. As the community reels from Hattie’s disappearance, the drama follows the mass hysteria and...

Mi5 veteran Peter Firth returns to BBC One during the first week of March in the new drama Mayday. The show is the brainchild of Whitechapel writers Ben Court and Caroline Ip, and like that show, Mayday focuses on the investigation of a grizzly murder. However, rather than placing the police detectives at the center of the action, Mayday is centered around the possible culprits and the friends and family members who may or may not reveal their suspicions to the police.

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